Painters USA industrial and commercial safety program.

We take steps to protect our employees and yours, following your rules and OSHA guidelines for workplace safety.

Value of jobsite safety

“Never Sacrifice Safety” is one of our core values and we ask all our employees at every level for 100% buy-in—working safely is a condition of employment. We back up those words with regular training and ongoing communication.

Painters USA’s commitment to safety protects your employees, your stakeholders, and ultimately your business. If an incident were to happen, we have crew members with first-aid training for basic, immediate interventions. Besides our own safety program, we participate in required job site and client-specific safety training prior to starting a project. These opportunities are welcomed as a way to meet your needs and further our safety knowledge.

Certified Safety Professional® in charge

Regional Safety Manager Darren Lottes, is guided by a strong, core philosophy: Injuries and incidents are preventable and safety is an integral part of everyone’s job, from new employees to seasoned veterans. Darren works tirelessly to make sure they all make it home unscathed, every single day. He further believes that injury prevention has a direct impact on morale, productivity, company earnings, and customer satisfaction.

Following are three key questions asked of Darren to describe how he ensures that safety is actually carried out where it matters the most—at client job sites.

What are the most common causes of safety incidents on a job site?

“I believe there are two root causes:

Inadequate supervision, which allows a weak safety culture and results in more incidents, in my experience. Senior management can push new safety initiatives, but they live and die with front line managers implementing them and holding their crews responsible.
Improper motivation, and in my opinion, that happens when you disconnect safety from productivity. If the company culture skews away from an equal balance of production, quality, and safety, you have the likelihood of more incidents by employees taking shortcuts to complete projects faster and managers incentivizing production over safety.”

What do you do to ensure our crews always keep safety top-of-mind?

“The biggest thing I do is to continually develop our safety culture. We accomplish this through training and laying out our expectations for safe operations. I look to safety representatives in the field like field supervisors and foremen to cascade important safety information across the company. Things like lessons learned from prior incidents, inspection and audit trends, and weekly health and safety topics, which all serve as positive reinforcement."

What happens if you personally see a potential hazard?

"If I'm on a field visit and happen to identify a potentially hazardous condition or behavior, I make it a learning opportunity as much as a possible disciplinary issue. And for each potential hazard that we discuss, I also recognize three or four positive things the crew is doing on the job. I also make it point to thank the crew for operating safely and continually enforcing our safety culture.”

Painters USA training and certifications

Safety performance you can measure

It’s easy to pay lip service to safety and welfare, but the numbers don’t lie. OSHA’s Total Recordable Incident Rate or TRIR and the insurance industry’s Experience Modification Rating (EMR) are metrics that quantify a company’s safety performance. We are proud of our safety record and know that it’s important to our customers.

Our crews are OSHA 10 / 30 card-carrying pros

Not all commercial / industrial painting contractors view safety as a core value, like Painters USA. We deliver OSHA 30 training (Construction version) to supervisors and OSHA 10 training to team members. This translates to 30 hours or 10 hours of workplace safety instruction by authorized trainers. Covering topics like general worksite safety and common hazards, OSHA training prepares our crews to prevent and avoid safety and health hazards.

4-year apprentice program

Painters USA has partnered with the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) to offer a 4-year Painting Apprenticeship. The Apprenticeship begins with basic painting skills, safety, and first aid and progresses to in-depth OSHA training and skill sets like equipment operation, coating systems, coating application, and flooring systems. Foremanship levels delve into job strategy, management and leadership, problem solving, material management and more. Knowing that our crews view their work as a career path and not just a temporary job gives our clients another reason to trust in Painters USA.

Aerial lift qualified operator

Most warehouse and distribution center ceilings range between 28 and 36 feet high. With advances in steel integrity and durability, storage tanks and silos have gone vertical to take up less real estate. These are just two examples that demonstrate how industrial and commercial cleaning, painting, and coating projects include surfaces that are way up there! Painters USA uses aerial lifts (also known as scissor lifts) or aerial swing stage platforms (also known as a Mobile Elevated Work Platform or MEWP) to get the work done safely and efficiently, even at the uppermost reaches of your facilities.

Fall Protection Competent Person

Slips, trips, and falls are the top reason employees get hurt, even though they are highly preventable through safety training, non-slip floors, light and bright facilities, and other means. Painters USA crews get OSHA Fall Protection Competent Person training so they can recognize and minimize falling hazards, especially on elevated platforms or lifts. This training is another way we deliver peace of mind to our clients.

Lock Out Tag Out (LOTO)

OSHA;s lockout / tagout (LOTO) standard protects workers by outlining actions and procedures to follow while servicing machines and equipment. As Painters USA workers perform their industrial cleaning and coating tasks, LOTO training and awareness prepares them to follow the rules when doing their work around machinery that is locked or tagged out. It’s one more safeguard that allows our clients to rest easy when Painters USA is working in their facilities.

Materials protection and performance

Manufacturers like Sherwin Williams, PPG, Benjamin Moore, PIP, Carboline, and others offer a wide range of high-performance commercial and industrial paints and coatings. These products target specific surfaces and operational demands with real problem-solving and value-added functionality. Painters USA has the product knowledge you need and the ethical, transparent approach you desire to help you select the best coating options for your needs.

Our safety culture

Safe workplaces are productive workplaces. They reduce insurance costs and potential legal problems. They protect lives and give the families of commercial and industrial workers the comfort of knowing their loved ones will return home every day. Say what you will about OSHA regulations, the agency has greatly improved workplace safety over the last fifty years. Painters USA makes safety a core value—one we share with many of our commercial and industrial clients. For us, safety is no accident, and we mean that in every sense of the phrase.

Suspended Scaffold (Swing Stage) Competent Person

Two-point adjustable suspension scaffolds hung by ropes or cables, also known as swing-stage scaffolds, may call up images of window washers dangling on the sides of skyscrapers. But they’re also an effective way to perform some cleaning and coating work. Painters USA offers OSHA suspended scaffold training to many of our employees so they will understand the nature of falls and falling object hazards, proper use and handling of materials on the scaffold, and maximum loads. It’s another commitment to our safety culture and clients’ peace of mind.

Respirator fit training

Painting and coating fumes can be harmful to the people exposed to them. OSHA’s Respiratory Protection Standard requires an appropriate, tight-fitting respirator for these workers. Painters USA equips our workers with NIOSH-certified respiratory protection to protect them from vapors, mists, and fumes. We are diligent about personal protection equipment (PPE) of all kinds to ensure our employees stay healthy and can perform the work needed by our clients with the greatest comfort and efficiency.

Scaffold Competent Person

Scaffolding is the second-most cited OSHA violation behind fall protection, and commercial / industrial painters spend a great deal of time on scaffolds. With over four decades of experience, Painters USA knows well that scaffolds are valuable equipment, which is why we train our team members to be a scaffold competent person. They learn scaffold types and requirements, practices for safe usage, fall protection, and more, all so that our clients have one less thing to worry about as we work in their facilities.

Cleared to work on maritime sites

The Transportation Worker Identification Credential, better known as TWIC, is a Maritime Transportation Security Act background checking requirement for workers who need access to secure areas of the nation’s maritime vessels, ports, and facilities. Many of our field employees have a TWIC card to be eligible to work on projects like fuel terminals along the Gulf coast or industrial facilities along Midwest waterways. It’s one more requirement that Painters USA can meet.

Confined space training for tight spots

What do tanks, silos, vaults, tunnels, equipment housings, ductwork, and pipelines have in common? They’re all considered confined spaces—configured with limited or restricted egress that creates hazards and complicates emergency rescue and first aid. To ensure our workers are not vulnerable, Painters USA follows OSHA guidelines for working in these potentially hazardous settings by training and certifying our crews and foremen to work in confined spaces.

Safety included with every project

The consequences and risks of safety shortcuts are simply not worth it. No matter how easy or complex your commercial or industrial facility needs are, we always perform our work safely. and we can help you find ways to “paint in” safety at your facilities.

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Painters USA industrial and commercial safety program. We take steps to protect our employees and yours, following your rules and OSHA guidelines for workplace safety.